Distinguished singers from abroad performed here, the first Slovak operas were staged (Ján Levoslav Bella’s Kováč Wieland – Wieland Smith in 1926; Viliam Figuš-Bystrý’s Detvan in 1928), and it was here that in 1935 Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District (Katerina Izmaylova) received its European premiere.
The drama company remained throughout the 1920s no more than a provincial Czech theatre. Only the sustained political pressure of Andrej Hlinka and his confederates obliged the management of the Slovak National Theatre in 1932 to create a separate company, headed by director Janko Borodáč, performing in Slovak. Even so, this national institution of the Slovaks retained its Czech company, led by Viktor Šulc. This Solomonic judgement remained in force until 1938! The period also saw the buttressing of Slovak theatre by the creation of the first theatre school, an Academy of Music and Drama (Hudobná a dramatická akadémia) in Bratislava.
The only other theatre to come into being at that time was in Košice, but this endured only from 1924 to 1930, to be re-established in 1937. However, when Miklós Horthy’s fascist Magyar troops entered the city (1938) the Slovak theatre there was abolished and was revived only after the Second World War.
Puppet theatre in those decades built on the fine tradition of the Stražan family, but still remained in the hands of small operators who received no interest or support from the Czechoslovak state.
Nineteen years in the life of the Slovak theatre (1920-1938) were marked, then, by the fiction of the Czechoslovak nation, which relegated it to a status of backwater. And yet, even at the beginning of the century there had emerged the formidable individuals who had laid the foundations of Slovak theatre culture: writers and dramatists Jozef Gregor Tajovský, Pavol Országh Hviezdoslav, Ivan Stodola, the symbolist Vladimír Hurban Vladimírov and Július Barč-Ivan; directors Janko Borodáč, Jan Jamnický and Ferdinand Hoffmann; actors Andrej Bagar, František Dibarbora, Oľga Orszaghová-Borodáčová, Hana Meličková, Martin Gregor and Ondrej Jariabek, and subsequently Mikuláš Huba, Viliam Záborský, František Zvarík, Gustáv Valach, Ladislav Chudík, Mária Prechovská, Mária Kraľovičová; and opera singers Janko Blaho, Helena Bartošová, Štefan Hoza, Margita Česányiová, Mária Kišonová-Hubová, Rudolf Petrák and Emil Schutz.

III.
By the 1930s, and after decades of hardship, Slovak theatre had the necessary basis for a sharp upturn. As mentioned, the first positive signs of this came in the Slovak National Theatre’s opera company, and it was a trend that continued throughout the decade and into the 1940s, culminating in 1949 with the staging of the most successful Slovak opera to date, The Whirlpool – Krútňava by Eugen Suchoň.